Health - Severe Hypertension

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Hypertension Symptoms

People with primary (essential) high blood pressure usually do not have any symptoms. Most people with high blood pressure feel fine and only find out they have high blood pressure during a routine exam or a doctor visit for another problem. Very severe high blood pressure (160 over 100 or higher), especially if your blood pressure rises very high quickly, may lead to hypertensive crisis. Symptoms of very severe high blood pressure include:

Headaches, especially pulsating headaches behind the eyes that occur early in the morning

Visual disturbances

Nausea and vomiting

Over time, untreated high blood pressure can damage organs, such as the heart, kidneys, or eyes. This may lead to:

Why Focus upon Stress and Hypertension?

Among the numerous medical diseases, syndromes, and disorders that confront modern medicine, essential hypertension (high blood pressure) stands out as a disorder that is commonly associated with stress and living a stressful life. Even the term 'hypertension' suggests a close linkage of this disorder to stress and tension rather than its more accurate description of elevated arterial pressure within the circulatory system. Although it is commonly believed that a strong causal link exists between stress and hypertension, just what kind of empirical evidence supports this assumption?

Does living increasingly stress-filled lives or exposure to extremely stressful incidents, like the trauma Franklin confronted, result in elevated blood pressure? And, if so, why don't all fire-fighters exhibit high blood pressure? Can strategies to improve stress management effectively lower blood pressure? The primary purpose of this site is to address these questions by examining the body of empirical evidence testing the assumption that stress is associated with the onset and maintenance of essential hypertension. ... read more »

In a properly functioning circulatory system, the various components of the nervous, neuroendocrine, and renal systems operate together to maintain blood pressures at an adaptive level so that organisms can maintain blood flow to all essential body tissues in a variety of physical states, locations, and positions, including physical activity, changes in temperature and climate, and even standing on one's head.

For some organisms, however, one (or more) of the various regulatory mechanisms outlined above no longer operates to maintain blood pressure in an adaptive range. ... read more »

Diagnosis and monitoring of treatment of severe hypertension require the accurate repeated measurement of blood pressure. Although on the surface it may seem that measuring blood pressure is simple, many factors need to be considered when obtaining measures of blood pressure for purposes of diagnosing and monitoring essential hypertension. For example, arterial pressure differs depending upon the specific site of the arterial bed from which the measure is ... read more »

Two general strategies have been employed to obtain measures of blood pressure during daily life: home monitoring and ambulatory monitoring. Home monitoring typically involves training the patient (or a family member of the patient) to operate an occluding cuff properly to obtain auscultatory measures of blood pressure on a daily basis. ... read more »

When nurses or physicians measure and record their elevated blood pressures in the clinic, these patients are often diagnosed and treated for essential hypertension as their elevated clinic arterial pressures are presumed to be representative of their daily arterial pressures ... read more »